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“Read Allah bout it” (Muslim conspiracy theories)

I have been on an unintended conspiracy theory kick of late, with four straight posts focusing on the topic. Let’s keep it going by addressing conspiracy theories with an Islamic flavor.

Muslim conspiracy theorists attribute so much power to Mossad and the CIA, it seems they should be worshipping those agencies instead of Allah. This power was displayed during a string of shark attacks in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, in 2010. Before delving into the attacks and their conspiratorial aftermath, please allow me a personal tangent. I knew Sharm el Sheikh shark victims before they were cool. I lived there for six months in 1999, where I met Herb. Herb had a mantra, “Everything is easy when the will is strong,” which he claimed to recite 500 times a day. Skeptic or not, I have no doubt about this. I would hear him saying it out loud to himself as he bicycled across the desert at night. He had an amazing biography that included fishing with Hemingway, introducing 15-year-old Mike Tyson to his trainer, and receiving unsolicited job offers of up to $500,000 a year. He turned the jobs down because he didn’t want to wear a suit.

I was interviewing him once when he decided that Muhammad Ali would be a better source for my question, so he thumbed through his rolodex for Ali’s home phone number. He stopped after realizing that the former heavyweight champion’s Parkinson’s disease would keep him from being speaking well enough. So he went to plan B, Norman Mailer. Norm wasn’t in, which was fine. The idea of conducting an unplanned and unscripted interview with Norman Mailer tended toward the intimidating side.

At any rate, Herb’s life experiences also included being bit by a shark during his daily three-mile swim from Sharm El Sheik to Tiran Island, Saudi Arabia. More than a decade later, shark attacks became common in the area for one week. There were five attacks, one of them fatal. Other than Herb’s shoulder being bit, there wasn’t much history of shark attacks in the area. The most likely reason for the abrupt spike was the dumping of sheep carcasses during an Islamic festival two weeks prior. But why blame Muslims when scapegoat Jews are nearby?

Some Egyptians, including the South Sinai governor, figured that Mossad agents were behind the attacks. This was typical of a pervading mindset in the region that sees Israel, and to a lesser extent the U.S., as behind any misfortune. Even the electricity going out is seen as sign of infidel sabotage. The shark attack victims were all Europeans, so the idea was that Israel was trying to cripple the city’s robust tourism industry. To do so, they captured a shark and planted a GPS unit on its back. That still leaves no explanation for how a device that tracks movement would enable a cartilaginous fish to be moved by remote control and then forced to chomp on a Ukrainian leg. On the flip side, a guy named Spielberg directed Jaws.

The university reported the vulture was part of a migration study, which is code talk for Zionist insurgency. Other birds have not returned, meaning they are out there getting more information. How they get it, what they have reported, and how they speak Hebrew is unknown. They are spies, after all.

Having promulgated theories based on sea and air, a ground-bound conspiracy is easy to concoct. Istanbul is the only city in the world that occupies two continents, and this has symbolic as well as geographic relevance. Turkey is a not-quite-east, not quite-west, locale that serves as both a dividing line between, and place of diplomacy for, two vastly different cultures. Turkey is populated by persons who would be comfortable living in places as disparate as Greece and Iran, and it borders both. So Istanbul provides just the right element for a Zionist plot to insult Turkishness though power chords.

The 2010 Sonisphere festival in Istanbul featured Metallica and Megadeth. But its most distinguishing characteristic was that it occurred the same month as a Gaza flotilla raid that killed nine Turks. As such, the concert was meant to mock the deaths by celebrating at a time of grieving. The headbanging was organized by Purple Concerts, which is run by Israelis. Of course, the show had been planned long before the raid took place. Or had the raid been planned long before the show took place? Conspiratorial minds want to know.

For evidence, Turkey’s Vakit newspaper noted both alcohol and Rammstein were present. Sonisphere played in 10 other countries in 2010, so the organizers were evidently also making fun of Greece for its debt crisis and needling Spain for losing the World Cup final.

Moving on. Hindu-Muslim rivalries are mostly associated with Kashmir, but if there’s a holy war brewing, Iran needs a slice of the jihad pie. Hence, its state-owned mouthpiece pushes the idea that Mossad agents cooperated with India to plot Umar Farouk Mutallab’s attempted plane bombing in 2009.

In the scheme, an Israeli security company paid for the would-be bomber’s plane ticket from Amsterdam to Detroit. He lacked a passport, but a mysterious “Indian man” arranged passage onto the plane. All this was made easier by Israel clandestinely controlling Nigeria and Yemen, where Mutallab was born and trained, respectively. The goal was to give the U.S. an excuse to invade Nigeria and Yemen. What interest Israel had in the U.S. invading countries that, per the theory, it already controlled, is never explained.

These have all been comical ideas, but we now make an abrupt transition to the jihad against polio vaccinations. As dangerous and unhinged as the U.S. anti-vaccine movement is, the threats to murder doctors, legislators, and lobbyists are unlikely to be carried out. Not so when a fatwa is ordered. In fact, scores of aid workers and their security guards have been killed since the latest vaccine jihad was declared in 2012. Another tragedy is the doubling of polio cases in Pakistan’s tribal regions during the time.

Maulana Fazlullah of the Pakistani Taliban considers the vaccinations a “conspiracy of Jews and Christians to make Muslims impotent and stunt their growth.” He also declared it to be against Islam to combat a disease before contracting it. He additionally declared women in public to be an obscenity, so he encourages the kidnapping and human trafficking of female health care workers.

We will close by returning a lighter note, specifically the idea of pig’s blood in cola. According to the Al-Riyadh Newspaper, “The scientific and medical research says that drinking Pepsi and Coke leads to cancer because the key element is taken from pork sausage. The pig is the only animal that eats dirt, dung and urine, which makes for lethal germs and microbes.”

The article goes through a host of maladies associated with the drinks, then warns, “Drinking six bottles of Pepsi or Coke at one time causes instant death.” Presumably at the hands of a Muslim polio jihadist.